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Monday, June 1, 2015

Hillary Gave Sweetheart Arms Deals To Clinton Foundation Donors

Here's an interesting coincidence, countries that donated to the Clinton Foundation "just happened" to get approvals for a bigger cache of weapons from the Hillary Clinton-run Department than the countries that didn't donate. And the real interesting part about this revelation was it was discovered and published by the ultra-liberal Salon.

The Secretary of State is in charge of “the continuous supervision and general direction of sales” of arms, military hardware and services to foreign countries. In practice, that meant that Clinton was charged with rejecting or approving weapons deals — and when it came to Clinton Foundation donors, Hillary Clinton’s State Department did a whole lot of approving."

Salon broke down the numbers and found some foreign governments received better deals than others:

While Clinton was secretary of state, her department approved $165 billion worth of commercial arms sales to Clinton Foundation donors. That figure from Clinton’s three full fiscal years in office is almost double the value of arms sales to those countries during the same period of President George W. Bush’s second term.

The Clinton-led State Department also authorized $151 billion of separate Pentagon-brokered deals for 16 of the countries that gave to the Clinton Foundation. That was a 143 percent increase in completed sales to those nations over the same time frame during the Bush administration. The 143 percent increase in U.S. arms sales to Clinton Foundation donors compares to an 80 percent increase in such sales to all countries over the same time period.

So if your govt. happened to give money to the Clinton foundation you would be able to increase your weapons purchase by 79% more than if you didn't donate (143/80).

American military contractors and their affiliates that donated to the Clinton Foundation — and in some cases, helped finance speaking fees to Bill Clinton — also got in on the action. Those firms and their subsidiaries were listed as contractors in $163 billion worth of arms deals authorized by the Clinton State Department.

When Bubba Clinton was president he signed an executive order that is still in place, the State Dept. must take into account a country's human rights record in its arms deals decisions. But when approving arms deals to Clinton Foundation donor countries Hillary would ignore that rule.

As just one of many examples, in its 2011 Human Rights Report, Clinton’s State Department slammed Algeria’s government for imposing “restrictions on freedom of assembly and association,” tolerating “arbitrary killing,” “widespread corruption” and a “lack of judicial independence.”

That year, the Algerian government donated $500,000 to the Clinton Foundation and the next year Clinton’s State Department approved a one-year 70 percent increase in military export authorizations to the country. The jump included authorizations for almost 50,000 items classified as “toxicological agents, including chemical agents, biological agents and associated equipment.” The State Department had not authorized the export of any of such items to Algeria the year before.

And even the 'non-partisan' watchdogs are beginning to ask questions:

“The word was out to these groups that one of the best ways to gain access and influence with the Clintons was to give to this foundation,” said Meredith McGehee, policy director at the Campaign Legal Center.

While these arms deals may seem like ancient history, Lawrence Lessig, the director of Harvard University’s Safra Center for Ethics, says they “raise a fundamental question of judgment” — one that is relevant to the 2016 presidential campaign.

“Can it really be that the Clintons didn’t recognize the questions these transactions would raise?” he said. “And if they did, what does that say about their sense of the appropriate relationship between private gain and public good?”

Of course it's probably all just a coincidence, just like everything in Peter Schweizer's book is a coincidence. I mean these are the Clintons... and they are so honest (depending what is, is).